Share on other sites

Pope Francis usually displays the right intuitions in matters theological and political. Recently, however, he committed a serious blunder in endorsing the idea, propagated by some Catholics, of changing a line in the Lord’s Prayer. The prayer’s contentious bit asks God to “lead us not into temptation”: “It is not a good translation because it speaks of a God who induces temptation. I am the one who falls; it’s not him pushing me into temptation to then see how I have fallen. A father doesn’t do that, a father helps you to get up immediately. It’s Satan who leads us into temptation, that’s his department.” So, the pontiff suggests we should all follow the Catholic Church in France which already uses the phrase “do not let us fall into temptation” instead.

Convincing as this simple line of reasoning may sound, it misses the deepest paradox of Christianity and ethics. Is god not exposing us to temptation already in paradise where he warns Adam and Eve not to eat the apple from the tree of knowledge? Why did he put this tree there in the first place, and then even drew attention to it? Was he not aware that human ethics can arise only after the Fall? Many perspicacious theologians and Christian writers, from Kierkegaard to Paul Claudel, were fully aware that, at its most basic, temptation arises in the form of the Good. Or, as Kierkegaard put it apropos Abraham, when he is ordered to slaughter Isaac, his predicament “is an ordeal such that, please note, the ethical is the temptation.”[ii]Is the temptation of the (false) Good not what characterizes all forms of religious fundamentalism?